Poems begining by W
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Wires
© Philip Larkin
The widest prairies have electric fences,
For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires
While Summer Suns O'er the Gay Prospect Play'd
© Thomas Warton
While summer suns o'er the gay prospect play'd,
Through Surrey's verdant scenes, where Epsom spread
'Mid intermingling elms her flowery meads,
And Hascombe's hill, in towering groves array'd,
What the Birds Said
© John Greenleaf Whittier
The birds against the April wind
Flew northward, singing as they flew;
They sang, "The land we leave behind
Has swords for corn-blades, blood for dew."
Where's the Poker?
© Christopher Smart
The poker lost, poor Susan storm'd,
And all the rites of rage perform'd;
As scolding, crying, swearing, sweating,
Abusing, fidgetting, and fretting.
Who Learns My Lesson Complete?
© Walt Whitman
The great laws take and effuse without argument;
I am of the same style, for I am their friend,
I love them quits and quits-I do not halt, and make salaams.
What God is like to him I serve
© Anne Bradstreet
What God is like to him I serve,
What Saviour like to mine?
We Are The Choice Of The Will
© William Ernest Henley
We tracked the winds of the world to the steps of their very
thrones;
The secret parts of the world were salted with our bones;
Wolf Knife
© Donald Hall
In the mid August, in the second year
of my First Polar Expedition, the snow and ice of winter
almost upon us, Kantiuk and I
attempted to dash the sledge
White Apples
© Donald Hall
when my father had been dead a week
I woke with his voice in my ear
I sat up in bed
When I Met My Muse
© William Stafford
I glanced at her and took my glasses
off--they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
Waking at 3 a.m.
© William Stafford
You think water in the river;
you think slower than the tide in
the grain of the wood; you become
a secret storehouse that saves the country,
so open and foolish and empty.
Wind
© Ted Hughes
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
With Tenure
© David Lehman
If Ezra Pound were alive today
(and he is)
he'd be teaching
at a small college in the Pacific Northwest
Will
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
There is no chance, no destiny, no fate,
Can circumvent or hinder or control
The firm resolve of a determined soul.
Gifts count for nothing; will alone is great;
Wittgenstein's Ladder
© David Lehman
"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way:
anyone who understands them eventually recognizes them as
nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb
up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder
after he has climbed up it.)" -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus
Warned
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
They stood at the garden gate.
By the lifting of a lid
She might have read her fate
In a little thing he did.
When A Woman Loves A Man
© David Lehman
When she says Margarita she means Daiquiri.
When she says quixotic she means mercurial.
And when she says, "I'll never speak to you again,"
she means, "Put your arms around me from behind
as I stand disconsolate at the window."
What Best I See In Thee
© Walt Whitman
WHAT best I see in thee,
Is not that where thou mov'st down history's great highways,
